Stablecoin issuers Tether, Circle, and World Liberty Financial froze billions of dollars worth of assets stolen in a Binance breach

Overview Debates Related claims Topics

Cc9f267dcClaimNews event

Israel extradited Israeli-Russian citizen Alexander Block to the United States to face federal charges related to an alleged $2.8 million crypto theft from Nomad

Israeli police arrested Alexander Block at Ben Gurion Airport in May 2025 as he prepared to board a flight to Russia, shortly after he changed his surname from Gurevich and obtained a new passport

Israel's Supreme Court held that publicly visible blockchain transactions do not reveal wallet ownership or rule out money laundering attempts to conceal fund sources

Alexander Block allegedly moved tokens worth more than $2.8 million stolen from Nomad through multiple crypto wallets and converted them into other cryptocurrencies to conceal their origin

A federal grand jury in the Northern District of California indicted Alexander Block in August 2023 on eight counts, including computer fraud, transporting stolen property, and money laundering

Ripple received final OCC approval for Ripple National Trust Bank on October 26, 2026 to support Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin and provide business custody services, following Circle's final approval in July 2026

Hackers drained approximately $6.36 billion from the Binance crypto exchange across 10 blockchains on October 29, 2026

Prosecutors allege that Alexander Block's initial August 2022 exploit exposed Nomad's software flaw to other users, leading to a wider drain of Nomad's funds that emptied over $186 million from a Nomad-controlled wallet

In December 2025, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a settlement requiring Illusory Systems, Nomad's operator, to return recovered funds to unreimbursed users following the $186 million Nomad breach in August 2022

Alexander Block's August 2023 U.S. federal indictment specifically charges him with four counts of computer fraud, one count of transporting stolen property, and three counts of money laundering

Operating under the username Bitlik around August 1, 2022, Alexander Block allegedly made six test transfers before completing four main transfers to steal over $2.8 million in crypto tokens from Nomad

Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals following the October 29, 2026 Binance hack while stating that user funds remained safe

Blockchain analytics firm TRM linked the October 29, 2026 Binance theft to the North Korean hacking unit TraderTraitor

Nomad recovered approximately $22 million in crypto assets in the days immediately following Alexander Block's August 2022 Nomad exploit

Days after the August 2022 exploit, Alexander Block returned some tokens and contacted a senior Nomad official on Telegram offering to return the rest for a fee before cutting off contact

THORChain's emergency pause mechanism was activated after an Ethereum reorg caused a duplicate 10 ETH refund to be processed, catching the anomaly post-transaction rather than preventing it beforehand

THORChain paused trading and swaps across 12 of the 13 chains it supports after an Ethereum reorganization triggered a double refund error on October 31, 2026

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported that THORChain's emergency halt temporarily slowed DPRK-linked efforts to launder funds stolen from Binance by freezing cross-chain swaps

Onchain data reviewed by The Block traced approximately $138,000 in stolen crypto funds from the Name.com DNS hijacking attack across EVM-compatible chains routed to three attacker wallets in fixed 15%, 55%, and 30% cuts

The hijacked websites include Pickle Finance, Origami Finance, FluxBeam, Echelon, StonkFun, StakePoint, Flap, and Kintsu, while their underlying smart contracts remained unbreached